I wrote about JustHTML yesterday - Emil Stenström's project to build a new standards compliant HTML5 parser in pure Python code using coding agents running against the comprehensive html5lib-tests testing library. Last night, purely out of curiosity, I decided to try porting...
Slop lost to "brain rot" for Oxford Word of the Year 2024 but it's finally made it this year thanks to Merriam-Webster!
Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen slop as the 2025 Word of the Year. We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”
I recently came across JustHTML, a new Python library for parsing HTML released by Emil Stenström. It's a very interesting piece of software, both as a useful library and as a case study in sophisticated AI-assisted programming.
First impressions of JustHTML
I didn't initial...
Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry
Brian Merchant has been collecting personal stories for his series AI Killed My Job - previously covering tech workers, translators, and artists - and this latest piece includes anecdotes from 12 professional copywriters...
If the part of programming you enjoy most is the physical act of writing code, then agents will feel beside the point. You’re already where you want to be, even just with some Copilot or Cursor-style intelligent code auto completion, which makes you faster while still leavi...
After deciding to use a skill, open its SKILL.md. Read only enough to follow the workflow.
If SKILL.md points to extra folders such as references/, load only the specific files needed for the request; don't bulk-load everything.
If scripts/ exist, prefer running or patching them instead of retyping large code blocks.
If assets/ or templates exist, reuse them instead of recreating from scratch.
Description as trigger: The YAML description in SKILL.md is the primary trigger signal; rely on it to decide applicability. If unsure, ask a brief clarification before proceeding.
One of the things that most excited me about Anthropic's new Skills mechanism back in October is how easy it looked for other platforms to implement. A skill is just a folder with a Markdown file and some optional extra resources and scripts, so any LLM tool with the ability...
LLM 0.28
I released a new version of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for interacting with Large Language Models. Highlights from the release notes:
New OpenAI models: gpt-5.1, gpt-5.1-chat-latest, gpt-5.2 and gpt-5.2-chat-latest. #1300, #1317
When fetching URLs as frag...
OpenAI reportedly declared a "code red" on the 1st of December in response to increasingly credible competition from the likes of Google's Gemini 3. It's less than two weeks later and they just announced GPT-5.2, calling it "the most capable model series yet for professional...
I've started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I've been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to provide useful functionality. I have built over 150 of these in the past year, almost all of them written by ...
The Normalization of Deviance in AI
This thought-provoking essay from Johann Rehberger directly addresses something that I’ve been worrying about for quite a while: in the absence of any headline-grabbing examples of prompt injection vulnerabilities causing real economic har...
I've never been particularly invested dark v.s. light mode but I get enough people complaining that this site is "blinding" that I decided to see if Claude Code for web could produce a useful dark mode from my existing CSS. It did a decent job, using CSS properties, @media (...
10 Years of Let's Encrypt
Internet Security Research Group co-founder and Executive Director Josh Aas:
On September 14, 2015, our first publicly-trusted certificate went live. [...] Today, Let’s Encrypt is the largest certificate authority in the world in terms of certifica...
Devstral 2
Two new models from Mistral today: Devstral 2 and Devstral Small 2 - both focused on powering coding agents such as Mistral's newly released Mistral Vibe which I wrote about earlier today.
Devstral 2: SOTA open model for code agents with a fraction of the parame...
I talked to Brendan Samek about Canada Spends, a project from Build Canada that makes Canadian government financial data accessible and explorable using a combination of Datasette, a neat custom frontend, Ruby ingestion scripts, sqlite-utils and pieces of LLM-powered PDF ext...
Agentic AI Foundation
Announced today as a new foundation under the parent umbrella of the Linux Foundation (see also the OpenJS Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, OpenSSF and many more).
The AAIF was started by a heavyweight group of "founding platinum members" ...
mistralai/mistral-vibe
Here's the Apache 2.0 licensed source code for Mistral's new "Vibe" CLI coding agent, released today alongside Devstral 2.
It's a neat implementation of the now standard terminal coding agent pattern, built in Python on top of Pydantic and Rich/Textual...
Martin Kleppmann makes the case for formal verification languages (things like Dafny, Nagini, and Verus) to finally start achieving more mainstream usage. Code generated by LLMs can benefit enormously from more robust verification, and LLMs themselves make these notoriously difficult systems easier to work with.
Deprecations via warnings don’t work for Python libraries
Seth Larson reports that urllib3 2.6.0 released on the 5th of December and finally removed the HTTPResponse.getheaders() and HTTPResponse.getheader(name, default) methods, which have been marked as deprecated via warn...
I finally got to check off the museum that's been top of my want-to-go list since I first started documenting niche museums I've been to back in 2019.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology opened in Culver City, Los Angeles in 1988 and has been leaving visitors confused as to what's real and what isn't for nearly forty years.
Thoughtful guidance from Bryan Cantrill, who evaluates applications of LLMs against Oxide's core values of responsibility, rigor, empathy, teamwork, and urgency.
Now I want to talk about how they're selling AI. The growth narrative of AI is that AI will disrupt labor markets. I use "disrupt" here in its most disreputable, tech bro sense.
The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company.
That's it.
That's the $13T growth story that MorganStanley is telling. It's why big investors and institutionals are giving AI companies hundreds of billions of dollars. And because they are piling in, normies are also getting sucked in, risking their retirement savings and their family's financial security.
— Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI
What to try first?
Run Claude Code in a repo (whether you know it well or not) and ask a question about how something works. You'll see how it looks through the files to find the answer.
The next thing to try is a code change where you know exactly what you want but it's te...
The Unexpected Effectiveness of One-Shot Decompilation with Claude
Chris Lewis decompiles N64 games. He wrote about this previously in Using Coding Agents to Decompile Nintendo 64 Games, describing his efforts to decompile Snowboard Kids 2 (released in 1999) using a "matchin...
If you work slowly, you will be more likely to stick with your slightly obsolete work. You know that professor who spent seven years preparing lecture notes twenty years ago? He is not going to throw them away and start again, as that would be a new seven-year project. So he will keep teaching using aging lecture notes until he retires and someone finally updates the course.
TIL: Subtests in pytest 9.0.0+
I spotted an interesting new feature in the release notes for pytest 9.0.0: subtests.
I'm a big user of the pytest.mark.parametrize decorator - see Documentation unit tests from 2018 - so I thought it would be interesting to try out subtests an...
Thoughtful commentary on Go, Rust, and Zig by Sinclair Target. I haven't seen a single comparison that covers all three before and I learned a lot from reading this.
One thing that I hadn't noticed before is that none of these three languages implement class-based OOP.
The Resonant Computing Manifesto
Launched today at WIRED’s The Big Interview event, this manifesto (of which I'm a founding signatory) pushes for a positive framework for thinking about building hyper-personalized AI-powered software.
This part in particular resonates with m...
Django 6.0 released
Django 6.0 includes a flurry of neat features, but the two that most caught my eye are background workers and template partials.
Background workers started out as DEP (Django Enhancement Proposal) 14, proposed and shepherded by Jake Howard. Jake prototype...
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